by Kane Gilmour
Rook pulled hard and moved a leg up, climbing the side rails on the outside of the stairwell like monkey bars. He flipped over the top rail and onto the steps. Below him on the other side of the stairs, he saw two more of the dire wolves climbing and leaping up the outside of the stairs as he had just done. Beyond them, he saw another one racing up the wall of the room, now several flights higher than him. They were circling around to get to Asya.
He ran higher and stopped above the two dire wolves climbing up the outside of the railings. He grabbed the rail and flipped over it, to the outside of the stairs, landing feet first on the head of the first of the two dire wolves. The impact thrust the creature off the stairs and it fell to the floor. The other creature saw what was happening and shimmied to the side.
With Rook dangling by one hand from a railing thirty feet above the floor, the creature scrambled up and across the metal steps and rails to reach him.
Rook tried to pull himself up with his one injured arm-the shoulder he had injured first in the incident with Edmund Kiss, and then again in the fight at Peder’s farm and most recently when the hybrid poked four fresh holes in it. No good. Between those injuries and the similar stunt he had just pulled on the other side of the stairs, he was lucky his arm could hang on preventing him from falling.
The dire wolf leapt to dislodge him, its body flying upward through the air. Rook did the only thing he could think of.
He let go.
SIXTY-TWO
Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway
4 November, 0245 Hrs
Queen led the way into the main room of the lab and found pretty much what she had expected.
Mayhem.
The giant cage of metal fingers now held a hundred-foot diameter glowing sphere of light shooting random bolts of lightning, which arced back to electrocute the metal struts. A harsh metallic smell of electricity burns hung in the air.
Dire wolves-a lot of them-were arrayed around the room, running to the metal staircase, climbing up the stairs, scaling up the outside of the freestanding stairwell or running up the walls to the catwalk. Rook was three stories up, dangling from one arm with a dire wolf climbing up to him. Asya was close to the top of the stairs, slamming her foot into a dire wolf’s face as it tried to climb over the red metal railing.
She ran into the room heading for the first dire wolf closest to her, a big tall one, which stood at least a foot taller than the others. She held her broken hand in toward her body and raised the curved Kurkri knife.
Beck entered the room after her, armed with one of Black Six’s spare MP5s. She fired at the legs of the dire wolf attacking Asya. The bullets raked its legs and it dropped, falling down toward where Rook hung by one arm.
“Crap,” Beck shouted.
Rook let go as a dire wolf leapt at him. They crashed together in the air and began to fall together, grappling and struggling with each other.
Black Six stepped into the room after Beck and fired a shot that killed the falling dire wolf stories above Rook. He saw its trajectory would take it onto Rook’s head, and fired another burst, making the creature’s body spin and flip in the air until its head smacked the railing and its now punctured corpse ricocheted away from the stairwell as it continued its fall.
Rook pulled his legs up onto the chest of the dire wolf he fought, intending to use the body to cushion his fall. Instead, he stopped short of the floor, clutched in the grip of a dire wolf reaching out over the first floor railing, its claws digging into his sides.
But Rook had seen the dire wolf above him get shot. Someone was covering him. “Thanks for the catch, Deputy Dawg,” he said and leaned his head to the side. He heard the buzz of the bullet as it zipped past his ear and buried itself in the creature’s forehead. The talons slipped from his side.
Rook fell to the concrete, but the drop was manageable. He used the dead dire wolf below to soften his landing. The impact jarred him hard, but he turned the fall into a roll, converting the impact’s kinetic force into motion.
Queen saw Rook fall, but was too busy fighting the big one to help. It was cagey and knew to stay back from her slashing blade. She had no interest in continuing the standoff. “Black Zero! Crotch shot!”
She circled the big one again with the knife as Beck heard her request and fired at several nearby dire wolves, aiming at their groins. The third target’s crotch erupted with a spray of fluid, and the big dire wolf turned its head. That was all the distraction Queen needed. She leapt forward, slicing upward, and cut the thing from the middle of its huge sternum up to its throat. An arc of white blood sprayed outward from the beast, coating Queen in yet more fluid. The beast also defecated on the floor before it crumpled.
“That’s just wonderful,” Queen said, disgusted. Then she ran for the next living target.
Rook picked himself up off the floor, limping and holding his shoulder. He was injured.
“Rook!” Queen called to him. “Duck!”
Rook trusted Queen implicitly. He didn’t need to know why she’d told him to duck, only that she had. He dropped to the floor and rolled again, this time narrowly missing being shot as Black Six expertly targeted the dire wolf that had been coming up behind Rook. Its head and chest spasmed from the two shots, then it fell over backward. Rook got to his feet and approached Beck, who was firing on the last few beasts on the stairwell.
“Who are-Hopping crap on a pogo stick. You’re that Pawn that used to work for Ridley’s security goons, before joining our side in the fight against the Hydra.”
“Black Zero,” she said, handing him her Browning. “I’m with Endgame.”
Rook gladly took the weapon and aimed it at one of the last living wolves in the room. He squeezed the trigger twice, and the running creature-just getting up to its full speed in the confines of the lab-slumped over dead, its body skidding a few feet on the slick concrete.
“What’s Endgame?”
Beck killed the last dire wolf on the staircase, as it tried to leap upward on the exterior of the stairs. “Support crew for Chess Team.”
“We have a support crew? Nobody ever tells me these things.” Rook hung his head and held his shoulder with the Browning still in his hand. He grimaced.
Queen stepped over with Black Six. The man turned as he walked, checking all sides of the room, never lowering his weapon.
“Did you know we had a support crew?” Rook asked Queen.
“Nope. I’ve been running around Russia looking for you for the past few months. How would I know?”
Asya had run back down the stairs and leapt off the last few steps to the ground. She hurried over to where Rook stood and was about to ask him a question, but she stopped, her mouth hanging open. Then Black Six opened fire again and all heads turned toward the portal.
Dire wolves poured out of the pulsing energy portal. There were so many that they were actually climbing over each other to get out through the wall of light-a wall that stretched at its bottom to over twenty feet wide. Rook figured as many as fifty of them. They struggled and fought to push through the yellow brilliance, emerging to race across the slick concrete floor.
Black Six stopped taking single shots and began firing bursts. Beck opened fire as well.
Queen reached over to Black Six’s thigh and withdrew his Browning. She picked her shots and made them count. Body after body clogged the entrance of the portal.
Rook fired carefully, conserving the few shots of ammunition in the Browning.
Asya, unarmed now, raced behind everyone to the security room. Rook figured she was taking cover.
Even though the group had fired enough rounds of 9 mm ammunition to drop a herd of elephants, the creatures kept pouring into the room. They scampered over their dead, covering themselves in the blood of their fallen.
“This is not working,” Rook shouted. “We’re gonna get overrun here.”
Asya reappeared with two AR-15 assault rifles. She handed one to Rook and he handed her the Browning. He racked b
ack the charging handle, and blasted another wave of the creatures. A puddle of white blood seeped out across the floor in front of the portal’s edge.
Black Six’s rifle stopped spitting its deadly hail of bullets and he shouted. “I’m out!”
Asya ran to him and gave him the second AR-15, then fired the last two rounds from the Browning, killing one of the dire wolves. Black Six opened up with the new weapon, dropping several more of the scrabbling creatures. When the weapon was empty, he retreated behind the rest of the group and out of sight. Rook kept firing until he was dry too.
“Too many,” Queen shouted. “Sons-a-bitches just keep coming!”
Dire wolf corpses littered the room now, and the pile at the entrance to the portal, a mound of arms and claws and bulging eyes, was at least four feet high. Seeing that the fight had nearly gone out of the group, the dire wolves slowed now as they stepped out of the light and into the cavernous room. Some squatted and sniffed the air. Others stepped forward slowly. More came through the glowing wall of energy. Rook watched as more and more came through and he lost track of the number.
They’re bleeding us dry, Queen thought, making us use all of our ammo. Fucking transdimensional rope-a-dope.
Rook turned to her. “We are going to need an escape plan before I run out of clean pairs of shorts today.”
SIXTY-THREE
Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway
4 November, 0300 Hrs
The enormous hangar doors disguised to look like shaded rock from the exterior split down the middle, revealing a chaotic battle that looked to King like Hell on Earth. Hidden motors concealed in the walls churned as the doors retracted on wheels set into a track in the floor of the huge space. A gust of wind blew a swirl of snow into the incredible scene before him.
The room was gigantic, and it held a sparkling energy portal one-hundred feet high. The glowing orb threw lightning and disgorged dire wolves as if they were jumping off a truck on the other side. A huge metal cage held the portal in place like an eight-digit hand holding a ball. In front of the sphere, a pile of dire wolf bodies impeded the newly arriving monsters like a barricade of sandbags. Beck’s MP5 spat bullets at the creatures. Queen stood off to the side, covered in white fluid, like liquid marshmallow, firing a handgun at any of the beasts that got close.
Rook and some woman King didn’t know ran toward him as he stepped into the gunsmoke clouding the air. Black Six was off to the side of the hangar doors, where he had operated the controls to let them in.
“Get down!” King leveled an FN-SCAR rifle and fired. Rook and the woman dove to the side, hitting the floor and rolling away. As the dire wolves clambered over the pile of dead, King’s shots riddled their bodies until they slipped down the front of the pile or added to the top of it. A river of white blood seeped from the carrion heap, sliding across the concrete floor as slow moving rivulets.
King wore the black and gray impact armor, but no helmet. He was armed to the teeth with rifles, handguns on both hips and a bandolier of grenades across his chest. Deep Blue stood to King’s left, wearing his battered black impact armor and his futuristic black helmet that made him look like he was ready to ride a motorcycle in a Japanese Shoei commercial. The man took up firing right alongside him.
To King’s right stood Matt Carrack, wearing an arctic white version of the impact armor, with one of the matching white padded helmets. The five security soldiers armed in the white impact suits, carried rifles, heavy machine guns and even a few grenade launchers. Even Reggie, White Eight, their weapons expert, was suited up in one of the armored suits, but like King, without a helmet. Instead, he wore huge red and black ear muffs King had seen him use on the firing range back at Endgame headquarters.
They all opened fire and the sound was deafening in the echoing chamber.
Beck ran around the field of fire and up to the group. Her face showed that she understood what the absence of Knight and Bishop meant. Reggie supplied her with weapons and ammunition.
Reggie quickly supplied Queen, Rook and the woman with him, with a new MP5 and three extra magazines each. No words were exchanged. Just action. But even if they had tried to speak, the sound of ceaseless gunfire would have drowned out their voices.
Dire wolves continued to flow from the portal, but were met by a wall of projectiles that was impossible to pass through. And each new corpse slowed the advance of those just arriving. The floor was so cluttered with dead that King doubted the creatures could get up to speed, even without the bullets. The perfect bottleneck.
Rook staggered back against the wall, using it to prop himself up. He fired his newly acquired MP5 one handed, his other arm hanging limp at his shoulder.
Queen stayed close to the new arrivals, squatting to the floor and taking up a classic kneeling firing stance. The White security team members began to fan out to the sides, to catch any stray dire wolves that escaped the main fusillade of bullets blasting at the center front of the portal. One of the men was armed with a grenade launcher attachment under his FN-SCAR rifle and fired several shots inside the center of the portal.
The onslaught of dire wolves increased until the rate of fire wasn’t enough and more of them slipped past the bullets, several coming through the portal already airborne, as though flung from the other side. Their sleek muscular white bodies leapt and hopped to the sides of the fray. They got close enough to two of the White team members to attack. The first one leapt onto White Four, throwing him to the ground and tearing at the man’s armored suit. King knew it was Four by his size-short and stocky, the new White Four was a nice guy, but everyone had kept their distance. The last several White security team members had been killed in action when GenY, Richard Ridley’s former security force, attacked the New Hampshire base. King blasted the creature on top of Four with a concentrated burst and it fell to the side, but the man didn’t get up.
Another dire wolf ripped into the man with the grenade launcher, and the weapon skittered across the slick concrete, stopping near where the portal ate into the floor. The man pulled his sidearm and fired several shots, but the dire wolf hacked and clawed at him until one of his armored arms came loose with a pop. The creature flung the arm and it landed with a thump and a wet splat in front of Queen’s kneeling stance. She adjusted her aim and unloaded until the magazine went dry. The creature shook as she perforated its long body with 9 mm slugs. She reloaded and moved the sights of her weapon back to the oncoming wave of white muscled bodies, before the dead beast hit the floor.
The woman King didn’t know hung back, firing her weapon at any target that stood still long enough for her to see it. She’s a pretty good shot, whoever she is. Deep Blue and the others took positions around the room, a few lying down, a few standing and others kneeling like Queen.
One of the White security members set up a tripod, and Reggie loaded an M2 with its chain-fed. 50 caliber death. The gun overpowered the sound of all the other weapons in the room. The metallic booming of the M2 sent the oversized bullets across the room, ripping into the dire wolf hordes as they emerged.
Blood sprayed.
Limbs severed.
Rook ducked to the floor near the man dealing death with the big machine gun. He picked up a rifle from a pile near the man. It was an M-16-the standard US infantry rifle-but this one had the M203 grenade launcher attachment on the underside of its barrel. “Fuckin-A!”
Rook targeted a huge metal strut that supported the portal. It had a section that had lots of electrical cables and more than the normal amount of the metal receptor plates that ran up its length. The 40 mm grenade shot out of the launcher tube and arced through the room, smashing into the concrete base of the metal upright, just as Rook fired another grenade at a second upright.
The first metal arm sheared off completely and fell inward, swallowed by the glowing ball of light. The other strut’s base exploded into fragments and the strut fell backward. Each explosion dwarfed the M2’s din and filled the air with a ball of oran
ge flame and a column of dark smoke. The detonations startled everyone and the shooting paused, as the metal support struts collapsed. Even the dire wolves paused and cocked their alien heads, looking upward at the damage.
“I told you I’d break that fucker.” Rook said. “I-”
The sphere of energy, no longer fully contained by the metal cage, bulged suddenly forward and upward, like a water balloon that had been squeezed hard on one side. When it hit the ceiling of the massive lab room, it ate right through, as though it had encountered nothing but more air. The front portion of the roof collapsed toward the team. Great chunks of stone and strips of steel crumbled from the ceiling, now open to the sky.
Rook watched the debris falling toward them. “Aww, shit.”
SIXTY-FOUR
Somewhere
Knight brushed his arms, attempting to dust some of the midnight blue grime off his body after the long climb. Or is it orange? He and Bishop perceived this world differently, but maybe neither of them saw it right.
Bishop motioned to the suitcase nuke hanging from Knight’s back. “Where did you find it?” He was walking along the cliff’s edge toward the distant pinnacle of rock that they had agreed was their only logical destination. Knight walked alongside the big man, but away from the cliff’s edge. It had taken him hours to climb the thing and he had no desire to slip and fall off it.
“In a crater. There are craters all around. From the portals.”
“Yep. Seen ‘em.”
“Debris from Earth surrounds most of them, like a pie crust.” Knight said, pointing out to the multitude of craters they could see in the distance.
Bishop stopped walking and peered out at the collection of divots on the distant plain.